Witnessing history from Boston: The 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign and the October Surprise that wasn’t to be

I never worked directly for Jimmy Carter. In fact, I have never met him, unlike my friend Art Milnes, a journalist from Kingston, Ontario, who would years later become a cherished personal friend of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. But I did spend the last 2½ months of the 1980 Jimmy Carter presidential re-election campaign working as a supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research, where I oversaw several hundred phone bank employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of our work that autumn was on the Carter campaign and U.S. Senate races.

I was 23 years old and had just moved to West Somerville, Massachusetts and was looking for a job in September 1980. I happened to be walking down the west side of Massachusetts Avenue, near Central Square in Cambridge, on a sunny, but crisp, late summer Boston morning, when I saw a help wanted job ad for interviewers down in a hole-in the-wall basement commercial space below sidewalk level.

I spent my first two days working the phones, polling voters state-by-state. I was then promoted to supervise phone bank interviewers. I remember thinking there apparently really is something to the American Story of meritocracy. My only previous experience in public opinion research had been working a few months earlier in the spring of 1980 on a Quebec Referendum project for a Winnipeg company, Opinion Place/Marketing Insights, as a field interviewer in Peterborough, Ontario for the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

My Cambridge Survey Research boss, Mark Leavitt, took me out to my first Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park to celebrate my promotion. I still remember his pre-game advice: “Make sure there is a full aspirin bottle by the coffeemaker for employees.” Back then, sampling was done with actual physical telephone directories and coding was done largely by hand. One of the curiosities I quickly noticed was that our ASA-and-caffeine-driven phone bank interviewers, if they spent more than a a couple of days working a region, would fairly quickly wind up sounding like the respondents from whatever area code they were calling and interviewing people on their political preferences, especially in smaller and more ethnically homogenous areas of the country. Some kid from Jersey would wind up talking slower and softer, like he was from the lowcountry of  South Carolina, after a few days. By far the most difficult voters to reach were those who had telephone numbers in the hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. You could call 100 numbers and 99 would be unreachable because of some technical glitch, or simply out of service.

While we knew we were in an uphill re-election battle against Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, I don’t think it was until the last days of the campaign, when we realized there would be no “October Surprise” with the release of the 52 United States diplomats and American citizens being held hostage by Iranian students in Tehran, that we also realized we were going to come up short on election day Nov. 4.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Red Line “T”. The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

After the Carter campaign, I went to work as research associate at Kenyon and Eckhardt (later Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon and Eckhardt) in Boston. I worked in the research department of the advertising agency’s Boston field office. Major commercial client accounts included airline and automotive companies.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

As for Jimmy Carter, well, he would go on to become the most consequential and respected former president in United States history. At 98, he is also the oldest-ever former president.

Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity International in 1976. From humble beginnings in Alabama, he rose to become a self-made marketing millionaire at 29. But as the business prospered, his health, integrity and marriage suffered, he noted later. In 1965, Millard and his wife Linda turned away from their millionaire lifestyle and rededicated their lives to serving God.

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, remain the best-known faces of Habitat for Humanity. Their involvement began in 1984 when the former president led a work group to New York City to help renovate a six-story building with 19 families in need of decent, affordable shelter.

A non-profit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action.

Through volunteer labour and donations of money and materials, Habitat builds and rehabilitates simple, decent houses alongside the homeowner partner families. It is not a giveaway program. In addition to a down payment and monthly mortgage payments, homeowners invest hundreds of hours of their own labour or sweat equity into building their Habitat house and the houses of others. Habitat houses are sold to partner families at no profit and financed with affordable loans. The homeowners’ monthly mortgage payments are used to build still more Habitat houses.

Jimmy Carter is not only finishing well. He started well.

“For myself and for our Nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

Those were the first words spoken by President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address Jan. 20, 1977. As Art Milnes noted in 2016: “It is often forgotten but President Carter on a January day in 1977 set the gold standard for how a winner treats their opponent. I will let President Ford, who lost that year, tell the rest of the story via his memoirs.”

“Mr. Ford described what happened the day President Carter delivered his Inaugural Address. ‘The weather that morning,’ Ford wrote, ‘was windy and cold, but the atmosphere was full of hope and the crowd that gathered below the East Front of the Capitol reflected that. Chief Justice Burger administered the oath to the thirty-ninth President of the United States.

Carter’s first words were, ”For myself and for our nation I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgD179mgMow). That was so unexpected, such a gracious thing for him to say. The crowd began to applaud, and I bit my lip to mask my emotions. I didn’t know whether to remain seated or to stand. But when the cheers continued I decided to stand and reached over to clasp Carter’s hand.’”

Carter went onto say, “Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

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A New England Thanksgiving: Midday Detroit Lions NFL football and a Star Market turkey from Porter Square

Most of my Thanksgiving celebrations have been in Canada, but twice in the 1980s I found myself living in the United States for Thanksgiving on Thursdays. I was living in West Somerville, Massachusetts (home of the now gone but never forgotten legendary Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell on Elm Street in Davis Square, where the ice cream was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer) in 1980, and in 1989, in East Durham, North Carolina.

Midday meant the traditional Thanksgiving Thursday Detroit Lions NFL football game classic. The Detroit Heralds started the tradition in 1917 when they played against the Canton Bulldogs in a 7-0 loss. The Heralds played again in 1920. then the short-lived Detroit Tigers football team played the Chicago Staleys in 1921. The Detroit Panthers played in 1925 and 1926, and the Detroit Wolverines played in 1928. Thanksgiving football in Detroit has been happening for more than a century. Detroit held its first such matchup against the Chicago Bears in 1934 and has played on the holiday every year since 1945. 

In the 1980 game, the Chicago Bears beat the Detroit Lions 23-17.

My New England turkey came from Star Market in Porter Square, I believe, in adjacent Cambridge, although the exact geography is a bit fuzzy after 42 years, while I believe Food Lion was my likely turkey supplier of choice in North Carolina at the other end of the decade in 1989. In New England, Star Market was something of a grocery story chain legend (New England has a lot legends). Started by Stephen P. Mugar in 1915, Star Market by 1980 was owned by Jewel-Osco, another supermarket chain headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Star Market I shopped at in Cambridge, I believe, was in a kind of redlined area for grocery stores, so neighbourhood supermarkets were few and far between.

Food Lion for its part had begun in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and was founded by Ralph W. Ketner.

Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family. While technically speaking, American Thanksgiving is a one-day holiday, like here in Canada, except on a Thursday instead of a Monday, for all intents and purposes it is part of a very long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon.

President Joe Biden pardoned two turkeys, Chocolate and Chip, on Monday as he discharged the presidential duty of the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon.

“The votes are in, they’ve been counted and verified, no ballot stuffing, no fowl play. The only red wave this season is going to be if German Shepherd Commander knocks over the cranberry sauce,” Biden told an audience on the White House South Lawn.

President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks was the origin for the pardoning ceremony, according to the White House Historical Association, a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1961 by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with a mission to protect, preserve, and provide public access to the rich history of America’s Executive Mansion.

Reports of turkeys as gifts to American presidents can be traced to the 1870s, when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending well fed birds to the White House. The First Families did not always feast upon Vose’s turkeys, but the yearly offering gained his farm widespread publicity and became a veritable institution at the White House. At Thanksgiving 1913, a turkey-come-lately from Kentucky shared a few minutes of fame with the fine-feathered Rhode Islander. Soon after, in December, Horace Vose died, thus ending an era.

By 1914, the opportunity to give a turkey to a president was open to everyone, and poultry gifts were frequently touched with patriotism, partisanship, and glee. In 1921, an American Legion post furnished bunting for the crate of a gobbler en route from Mississippi to Washington, while a Harding Girls Club in Chicago outfitted a turkey as a flying ace, complete with goggles. First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted a turkey from a Vermont Girl Scout in 1925. The turkey gifts had become established as a national symbol of good cheer.

With animal rights activists picketing nearby, President George H.W. Bush quipped “‘Reprieve,’ ‘keep him going,’ or ‘pardon’: it’s all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn’t end up on the president’s holiday table.”

Recently, White House mythmakers have claimed that President Harry S. Truman began the tradition of “pardoning” a turkey. However, the Truman Library & Museum disputes the notion that he was the first to do so. The focus on Truman stems from his being the first president to receive a turkey from the Poultry and Egg National Board and the National Turkey Federation. From September to November 1947, announcements of the government encouraging “poultryless Thursdays” grabbed national headlines. Outrage from homemakers, restaurant owners, and the poultry industry was palpable in Washington. This came to a head when the poultry industry pointed out that the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the three big turkey holidays, happened to fall on Thursday. The effort was deflated in time for Thanksgiving, but not before poultry growers had sent crates of live chickens— “Hens for Harry”— to the White House in protest. The turkey they presented to President Truman that December promoted the poultry industry and established an annual news niche that endures today.

While 1947 was the beginning of the official turkey presentation from the poultry industry, the turkey pardon remained a sporadic tradition. In December 1948, Truman accepted two turkeys and remarked that they would “come in handy” for Christmas dinner. There was clearly no plan for these birds to receive a presidential pardon. The Washington Post used both “pardon” and “reprieve” in a 1963 article in which President Kennedy said of the turkey, “Let’s keep him going.” During the latter years of the Nixon presidency, Patricia Nixon accepted the turkeys on behalf of the President and in 1973 sent the bird to the Oxon Hill Children’s Farm.

A piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour in November 2014 also offered a comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

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Thanksgiving trivia to feast on

Looking back recently at some old newspaper columns and blog posts, I was a bit surprised to realize how much I’ve written over the years about both Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving. I don’t write about the kick-off to turkey-gobbling season every fall, but many I do.

Most of my Thanksgiving celebrations have been in Canada, but twice in the 1980s I found myself living in the United States for Thanksgiving on Thursdays. I was living in West Somerville, Massachusetts (home of the now gone but never forgotten legendary Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell on Elm Street in Davis Square, where the ice cream was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer) in 1980, and in 1989, in East Durham, North Carolina.

My New England turkey came from Star Market, while I believe Food Lion was my likely turkey supplier of choice in North Carolina at the other end of the decade in 1989. In New England, Star Market was something of a grocery story chain legend (New England has a lot legends). Started by Stephen P. Mugar in 1915, Star Market by 1980 was owned by Jewel-Osco, another supermarket chain headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Star Market I shopped at in Cambridge, I believe, was in a kind of redlined area for grocery stores, so neighbourhood supermarkets were few and far between.

Food Lion for its part had begun in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and was founded by Ralph W. Ketner.

Canadian Thanksgiving, eh? February, April, May, June, October, November: A very moveable feast historically.

But in more recent, years Thanksgiving, if you’re in Canada, has meant celebrating on a Monday, more specifically, the second Monday of October since Jan. 31, 1957. Although Thanksgiving falls on a Monday, many Canadians have their dinner and family get-togethers the day before on the Sunday. While the second Monday of October has been the fixed official Canadian Thanksgiving date for the last 62 years, such has not always been the case. Historically, up until 1957, the Thanksgiving holiday – and even the word “holiday” might be bracketed by quotation marks – was somewhat of a moveable feast, and in that way not dissimilar to the American Thanksgiving holiday, which, while it falls later than our annual harvest observance, also moved around until 1957 when it began to be consistently celebrated on the the fourth Thursday in November across the United States.

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the English explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. Frobisher didn’t succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, maybe in the eastern Arctic, maybe in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

The second Canadian Thanksgiving after Frobisher’s in 1578 was held in Nova Scotia in the late 1750s. Residents of Halifax also commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris of 1763, where France formally ceded Canada to the British, with a day of Thanksgiving.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Upper Canada on June 18, 1816 to mark both the  Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812, and another Treaty of Paris almost 11 months later on Nov. 20, 1815, ending the war between Great Britain and France. Lower Canada had already had their Thanksgiving celebration almost a month before Upper Canada on May 21, 1816.

The cessation of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed 9,000 lives, more than half of them in Lower Canada, was reason enough to have Thanksgiving on Feb. 6, 1833. The restoration of  peace with Russia at the Congress of Paris and a third Treaty of Paris after the three-year Crimean War was enough for the United Province of Canada, made up of Canada East and Canada West, to have Thanksgiving on June 4, 1856. The first Thanksgiving Day after Confederation was on April 15, 1872, to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness.

In 1879, Parliament declared Nov. 6 a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday.

Over the years many dates continued to be used for Thanksgiving, the most popular for many years being the third Monday in October. After the end of the First World War, both Armistice Day, as it was then known, and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell.

Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day.

Finally, on Jan. 31, 1957, Parliament proclaimed, “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the second Monday in October.”

An official observance, however, isn’t quite synonymous being an official holiday. Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday across Canada, except for the Atlantic provinces of Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. However, Thanksgiving is a designated retail closing day in Nova Scotia. Just to be clear, if we’re talking turkey.

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Through the eyes of a hermit: Maine’s North Pond Hermit and the Hermit of Gully Lake in Nova Scotia

Hermits fascinate us. Or maybe it’s just the idea of hermiting that fascinates us, especially after a bad day in civilization. In any event, hermits were back in the news recently with the publication of The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel, which the Guardian had a March 15 online excerpt from at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/mar/15/stranger-in-the-woods-christopher-knight-hermit-maine

Finkel is an immensely talented writer, and in an odd way perhaps the perfect choice really to write Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit’s story. Finkel’s also been an outsider and a rule-breaker, which might be considered more praiseworthy than condemnatory, if he wasn’t also something of a fabulist. I’m not sure much other than Finkel’s more polished writing skills and a matter of degree of culpability separate him from such other well-known earlier fabulists as Stephen Glass, who was a staff writer at the New Republic in the late 1990s, or contemporaneously with Finkel’s own work, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. Perhaps we just need to have faith that time has redeemed Finkel.

In 2002, Finkel was a New York Times Magazine contract writer who wrote the infamous feature story, “Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?” which chronicled the life and work conditions of a young labourer on an Ivory Coast cocoa plantation. Although Youssouf Malé is real person who indeed exists, Finkel built his feature story for the New York Times Magazine around a composite character, combining the stories of several boys, with time sequences and certain other facts falsified. The real Youssouf Malé spent less than a month at the plantation, not a year as Finkel reported. Youssouf’s return to his home and his parents, of which Finkel wrote, was told to him by another boy. A scene from the article in which a psychologist interviews Youssouf Malé never took place. Finkel wrote about what he had done three years later in 2005 in True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, and has pretty much gone onto successfully resume his freelance journalism career over the last decade.

As for the subject of his new book, Maine’s Christopher Knight, one expects that someone who voluntarily disappears from the world and into a hermit’s life from 1986 to 2013, might have some deep philosophical insights with all that away-time from the distractions of the Modern World. You might expect that, but you’d be wrong. It’s not Knight’s story, at least as Finkel tells it here. Still, it is an absorbing story, a compelling read, but you get no sense of Knight being analogous to fellow New Englander Henry David Thoreau and  Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where he goes to journey within, to explore “the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being.”

Assuming Finkel is a reformed fabulist and not a fabulist of 18th-century English history, aside from Knight’s personal story, I can’t deny being fascinated by the background to the piece, where I learn: “It was believed that hermits radiated kindness and thoughtfulness, so advertisements were placed in newspapers for “ornamental hermits” who were lax in grooming and willing to sleep in caves on the country estates of the aristocracy. The job paid well and hundreds were hired, typically on seven-year contracts. Some of the hermits would even emerge at dinner parties and greet guests.”

Who knew? Not me.

The closest I’ve ever been to a real-life hermit was on the  day of the two H’s in the late fall of 1999. I was assigned by the then Truro bureau chief of the Chronicle Herald to spend a day deep in the woods looking for a hermit near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains of Nova Scotia.

Or in the alternative, he said, I could spend the day up around Londonderry and the Cobequid Toll Plaza on Highway 104, climbing down highway embankments counting lost hubcaps, as he speculated there was an inordinately large number of same to be found. Either way it was going to be an outdoor day. Hermits or hubcaps: I opted to look for the hermit, Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, who didn’t like killing people, he said later, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police, and never came out of the woods.

Well, at least that’s what folks around there said to strangers. When I stopped in at Earltown General Store on Highway 311 up in the Cobequid Mountains between Earltown and Tatamagouche on the North Shore to enquire about MacDonald, I was met with more or less polite silence, although one person allowed it might just be possible the Hermit of Gully Lake just might be known to Canada Post and the occasional piece of mail might arrive for him to be held for general delivery.  And that was the extent of the helpfulness of folks who were protective neighbours solicitous of Mr. MacDonald’s long-held privacy. MacDonald may have been a hermit, but he wasn’t without friends, lest anyone think the two – being a hermit and having friends – were incompatible. Not for all hermits apparently. Reclusiveness is a relative thing.

So  it was then that I spent an unseasonably warm late November day tramping around the sun-dappled woods and sun-reflecting and still unfrozen ponds, squinting and listening, trying to somehow locate the Hermit of Gully Lake. It was a very pleasant gig as daily newspaper assignments went, but I never did find MacDonald. But he may have found me. There were several discretely unsettling moments that afternoon when I had the certain feeling I was being watched from the dense bush and forest by someone. I could feel their eyes on me, although I never saw them. The watcher had become the watched. Little did I know that day near the close of the 20th century and dawn of the new millennium that within a couple of years of my futile late 1999 hunt for MacDonald, the Hermit of Gully Lake would become something of a Nova Scotia folk hero and minor celebrity of sorts during his twilight years.  There were indeed people who knew about his dilapidated, two-metre-by-two-metre shack, where he would sometimes compose music on a homemade guitar.

The Nova Scotia Department of Community Services financed construction of a small cabin for him. He tried it but found it too close to civilization. A forest fire wound up destroying his preferred dilapidated cabin, so he went back to the winterized cabin.

MacDonald, 87, disappeared for good when well-meaning and probably conflicted visitors went to get medical help, against his wishes, after he became ill in late November 2003, almost four years to the day after my one-day quest to find him.

MacDonald had been born in the Bay State, more specifically in Somerville in the Commonwealth of  Massachusetts, on Aug. 13, 1916. Many years later, I, too, would live in Somerville, more specifically West Somerville, near Powder House Circle, between August 1980 and August 1981. It is also known as Powder House Square. Circle, square. Where else but Massachusetts would the two be synonymous? I was 23 and 24 years old at the time. My daily walks often included strolls over the Somerville-Medford-Arlington lines,  passing Tufts University on my walk. Or a bicycle ride over the Cambridge line on my 10-speed CCM Targa up or down nearby Massachusetts Avenue, invariably known locally as “Mass Ave,” the second-most famous Massachusetts Avenue in the United States, trumped only by the street of the same name in Washington, D.C.

But this was our Massachusetts Avenue right in Massachusetts. Harvard Yard in Cambridge in one direction to the southeast and Minute Man National Historical Park at Concord in the other to the northwest. In November 2007, Boston Magazine aptly enough described Mass Ave this way: “Its 16 miles of blacktop run from gritty industrial zones to verdant suburbia, passing gentrified brownstones, college campuses and bustling commercial strips.”

Which makes wonder what Somerville was like in MacDonald’s 1920’s youth? I never got to ask. Willard Kitchener MacDonald’s body was found on June 27, 2004 by more than 100 volunteers searching the Gully Lake area for his remains. Since then, the Truro-based Cobequid Eco-Trails Society has officially named a trail the Willard Kitchener MacDonald Trail. One wonders what MacDonald might think of that.

Pictou County, Nova Scotia songwriter Dave Gunning wrote a song about Willard Kitchener MacDonald in 2004 called “Let Him Be.”

The old cabin’s gone, it burned to the ground
They go looking still to find him but he doesn’t make a sound
60 years of walking down, this long road alone
He’s earned the right to stay and choose how to go

Joan Baxter, a well-respected Nova Scotia author, journalist, development researcher/writer and anthropologist, who now divides her time between Canada and Africa, wrote a biography, The Hermit of Gully Lake: The Life and Times of Willard Kitchener MacDonald, published in 2005. The book was short-listed for the Booksellers’ Choice Award at the 2006 Atlantic Book Awards.

A year later, in September 2007, Toronto-based filmmaker Amy Goldberg’s Willard: The Hermit of Gully Lake, a documentary on the by then famous recluse, debuted at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax.

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